5 Inferential Research Questions
5.1 Introduction and Chapter Overview
Chapters 2–4 concerned only what happened inside our data – as expressed perhaps a bit cryptically at the end of Sections 2.1, 3.1, and 4.1. This chapter spins around one key question: How can we be sure what we find inside our data is something that also takes place outside our data? This is an inferential research question. To answer it properly, I take a rather circumstantial route with many stops along the way. Why bother with this? The short answer is that it needs to be done!
Sections 5.2–5.5 build the foundation for the main event of this chapter, namely Section 5.7 on hypothesis testing and the assessment of statistical significance. ...
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